A recent business profile of Lenovo in a national newspaper made an interesting assertion. "Anyone you spot on the Tube using a ThinkPad has almost certainly obtained it from their employer," claimed the reporter.
Lenovo ThinkPad X220T Tablet with a twist: Lenovo's ThinkPad X220T
Well, discerning readers know this isn’t true …

Screen Ratio

Lenovo in UK

>"Anyone you spot on the Tube using a ThinkPad has almost certainly obtained it from their employer," claimed the reporter.

Oh heck - big mystery there. As Lenovo in the UK barely have any machines available through retail channels - what a shocking revelation! How many machines in the Argos, PC World, Comet or any number of large retailers' offerings are Lenovo? Very few and far between. So of course most machines will be from their employers (most of the times medium to large organisations). Lenovo seems to be focused in the UK firmly on the corporate market.

What is the reason for that? Heck if I know. But it does mean that, being hard to find through retails channels - it is less likely that people will buy them themselves. Of course, the fact that their professional grade machines are not exactly "consumer" priced (and probably rightly so) - doesn't make them a favourite with the average man/woman/cat on the street.

There you go - mystery solved for you. No need for fancy statistics based on Tube samples.

vertical resolution

1366x768

The preponderance of 1366x768 laptops is disappointing....to think that the vertical resolution of most small-ish laptops today is *exactly* the same as it was in the 1990s when 1024x768 was the norm! And what's the point of a 16:9 laptop anyway? Is watching DVDs the only thing people use laptops for?

Wide screen on a business laptop = fail

Have to agree with all the comments around this annoying obsession with wide screen 16:9 ratios.

It is pretty much useless on a business machine, and probably about 95% useless on a laptop for home use.

I've got a T400 at work, and that's the older 1280 x 800 size. At 800, this screen is only just high enough for most uses, but forces you to scroll up and down all the time when using normal apps, such as writing or reviewing documents in Word etc. Most of the width is wasted, as almost all apps don't utilise this extra screen estate. So this new 1366x768 size is actually making things worse! Taking away the hight, when you really need more, and adding to the width, when you really need less of this!

The only use I can see for having a 19:9 ratio, is for watching movies, and I'll never do that at work, and have only ever done that once away from work.

So that basically means, at least for me, all current laptops with a 16:9 ratio screen, are unsuitable for purpose for about 99.99% of the time.

Bring back 4:3 for business use, or at least give people the option. Even 16:10 is better, as at least there you don't loose all the hight!

Wide screen on a business laptop = fail * 2

Lenovo, stop copying everyone else. I want a 4:3 screen. This is a machine to work on, not play movies!

I'm still using the Thinkpad R52 which I've had more years than I care to remember because it has a 4:3 screen which is 1400x1050 pixels, and still only 15". Incidentally I bought it myself, with my own money to replace the Thinkpad A30 which I had also bought with my own money, but unfortunately stood on after many years of reliable service :'(

The only way I can get that kind of vertical resolution on a laptop these days is to buy something which is 1920x1080, and the size of a f*cking aircraft carrier's flight deck.

Please please please be a little different, stop being a sheep, and give me a good upgrade path, because at the moment I'm seriously looking at bi-passing the sata/pata bridge chip you put in this machine so I can install a sata SSD to get some more speed out of it and run it for another 5 years!

X61 Tablet

And to think, that a X61 Tablet can be loaded with 8GB of RAM, use SSD in the drive slot and normal big HDD in docking station, have 802.11n wireless and have 1400x1050 screen and play Full HD video with multithreaded mplayer...

No SSD

Screen rotation

"In one major departure to previous Lenovo tablets, the screen rotates only clockwise. " Just like my X60 Tablet which has a screen that rotates only clockwise then.

I bought my X60 several years ago as a private purchase and the only thing I have needed to do is replace the HDD with a larger one. Now how do I get the other half to buy me one of these X220Ts for my birthday?

A few points....

a) Every single Tablet Thinkpad I've owned (X41, X61, and I've used the one before the reviewed one) only ever allowed you to turn the LCD screen clockwise. That is nothing new.

b) All Tablet Thinkpad's don't have the thinklight, due to the fact that the screen bezel has to be flush in order to be able to be used both as a tablet and normal machine. I can tell you to this day I miss that feature from the tablet Thinkpads, and it's always a toss up when it comes to a new machine, whether I'd prefer a tablet or the LED light.

(Long long time Thinkpad user, although all owned by me rather than corporate)

"obtained through their employer"

Thinkpads have a longevity in line with their robustness, and are very popular 2nd user systems. If you spot someone with a T30 or a T40 through T43 (and the odd T60 as well), chances are it's an ex-corporate machine doing sterling service for value and quality concious individuals. Just look on eBay to gauge this popularity. A T43 will still do everything most people want to do on the move, especially if loaded with Linux.

I'm glad I agree with Andrew on something, even if it is something as mundane as a choice of laptop!

@Peter Gathercole

Exactly

I'm on my 4th Thinkpad X series laptop at the moment: all bought second-hand with my own money, run for a few years with Debian and then sold on still with more life left in them. I won't buy anything else.

Maybe...

... just maybe, lenovo ought to hire a couple of their ever loving harshest critics for some design advice. I'm happy to see they picked up a couple things but then it saddens me to see how they manage to opt-in on mediocrity on just about everything else time and time again. Do we really need to rely on start-ups for any actual innovation?

And Andrew, couple tiny nitpicks: While waxing on the qualities of the keyboard and notwithstanding that the thinkpad keyboards are well-known for being pretty good, tyops look a bit sloppy especially there and then. Apropos wireless, mentioning /only/ "802.11n" doesn't tell me what band(s) are supported. I suspect it might very well be 2.4GHz and 5GHz both in this case, but it is something I expect to learn from tech specs all the same. Also, I'd suspect some of us would be interested to hear (which would be me moreso if indeed some employer would get me one or rather two of these things, though I'd still bitch about its design failures, but I digress) whether the fancy features like touchscreen and tilt awareness and such are supported by foss drivers, like for linux or some member(s) of the *BSD family. And, colour me ignorant, but wth is gorilla glass? Does that cure or curse with gorilla arm?

Not hard to find

This longtime ThinkPad lover has five in the house, the oldest being a seven-year-old T41 still happily running WinXP all day and every day.

The reason for this laptop cornucopia is Lenovo's excellent online selling operation, which tempts all too often with discounts and special offers on new models. If you fancy a ThinkPad, go to shop.lenovo.com, choose your country from the dropdown list, and take your plastic firmly in hand...

looks like the elisabeth duke of tablets..

Thinkpads

Ended up a domestic thinkpad owner by being given a chunky 380z and a 600.

The 380z was running 98, replaced the HDD and dual booted 3.1 and 95 for old games.

The 600 runs Win2000 very well. Upgraded the RAM on both and they share a Cisco Aironet PCMCIA card that gives them wireless capability.

Corporate wise, my last place was taken over by a big blue corporation and they dished out thinkpads. Then, my new place, thinkpads again. Seem to be no-nonsense corporate machines. However, they don't seem to like suspend mode, and the new one occasionally reboots itself (which I put down to the US powerpack. When working from home on a spare UK powerpack it behaves itself).